Case: Portugal Contemporary Art Guide

Uhura created an award-winning mobile app to make contemporary art in Portugal more accessible, discoverable, and connected.

Portugal Contemporary Art Guide was created as a new digital tool for discovering and experiencing contemporary art across Portugal. Developed for Contemporânea Magazine, one of the country’s leading contemporary art publications, the platform combines agenda, guide, and map into one bilingual mobile experience for artists, curators, professionals, students, tourists, and art enthusiasts alike. Uhura designed and developed the award-winning app, including UX strategy, information architecture, interface design, and technical implementation.

  • UX Design
  • Interface Design
  • App Development

Challenge

The ambition behind Portugal Contemporary Art Guide went far beyond creating a traditional exhibitions directory. The app needed to bring together a highly fragmented contemporary art landscape and transform it into an intuitive, accessible, and continuously updated digital experience.

A central challenge was structuring and connecting large volumes of editorial, curatorial, and location-based content in a way that allowed users to naturally explore artists, exhibitions, museums, galleries, collections, and cultural spaces across Portugal. At the same time, the application needed to serve very different audiences — from art professionals and curators to tourists and casual visitors — while maintaining a clear, elegant, and highly usable experience enriched by real-time updates, location-based discovery, and notifications.
mobile device with Portugal Contemporary Art Guide App opened showing exposition cover
mobile device with Portugal Contemporary Art Guide App opened showing artists profile
mobile device with Portugal Contemporary Art Guide App opened showing option to save, share or add to calendar of an exhibition

Solution

Uhura collaborated closely with the team of Contemporânea to define the platform vision, user journeys, and core features. Based on extensive UX research and rapid prototyping, Uhura designed a mobile experience that translates translates a complex cultural landscape into an intuitive and visually clear mobile experience.

The interface was intentionally designed to feel lightweight and editorial, allowing artworks, exhibitions, artists, and cultural spaces to remain at the center of the experience. The app combines agenda features, interactive maps, artist and exhibition discovery, editorial content, and personalized notifications into a fluid cultural guide designed for both everyday exploration and planned visits. Particular attention was given to navigation, filtering, and location-aware interactions to help users naturally move between places, events, and stories across Portugal’s contemporary art scene.

The platform was developed using Flutter and connected to a custom backend environment that enables dynamic content publishing, real-time updates, and long-term editorial scalability.

Result

The Portugal Contemporary Art Guide App won multiple national awards and established a new way of discovering contemporary art in Portugal. By combining editorial curation, location-based discovery, and cultural storytelling, it provides a more accessible and connected experience for the Portuguese contemporary art scene. This strengthened Contemporânea’s role as a leading voice within the national art ecosystem.

  • 3

    Awards

  • 5

    Months from brief to release

  • + 7500

    Downloads in the first month

Platform & Website Cases